Regarding the way-out-there jazz musician Ornette Coleman, a colleague purportedly said, “I’ve listened to him sober, I’ve listened to him stoned, I’ve listened to him drunk. I still don’t get it.”
I can’t say that I’ve gone to those lengths, but I’ve put a fair bit of time into reporting on the strange and terrible process to replace District 4 Supervisor Joel Engardo — and, subsequently, replace his replacement.
I still don’t get it.
The hunt started with a close-to-the-vest process. Some two weeks before Mayor Daniel Lurie appointed political unknown Beya Alcaraz to succeed Engardio, his team poll-tested a candidate with the pseudonym “Sarah Reyes,” whose life story matched Alcaraz’s.
While Reyes apparently polled well, the real candidate, Alcaraz, was out within a week. This came following revelations of appalling conditions in her former pet shop and her own written messages regarding paying workers “under the table” and skimping on taxes.
How the mayor’s office had the wherewithal to poll-test the mass appeal of a fake Alcaraz, but not to undertake a comprehensive background check on the real Alcaraz — well, I still don’t get it.
In the wake of this unkind collision between marketing and reality, the mayor’s office pivoted to a game show model: Perhaps you could call it “Who Wants to be a District 4 Supervisor?”
The so-called “finalists” were publicly disclosed, and given “homework assignments” to prove their mettle at what is, admittedly, a very complicated job.
These assignments consisted of: Interacting with District 4 voters, engaging in a fake press conference with fake reporters and squaring off against each other in a candidate forum held at an Irving street pizza parlor.
One “finalist” didn’t make it to the pizza debate because it turned out that she had missed voting in nine consecutive elections and was, until recently, a registered Republican.
In this game show, instead of being handed a dead rose or a bag of dog excrement or whatever signals a disqualification, you just get a call from a real reporter who actually vetted your voting record.
This unfortunate ordeal will likely run its course next week (or sooner) with the announcement of the next supervisor. It hasn’t been a great look.
It also hasn’t been great politics. One would think an underlying purpose of Team Lurie’s selection process would be to anoint a candidate capable of beating a progressive contender like Natalie Gee, who would vote against the mayor’s agenda on any number of matters.
But no matter who wins “Who Wants to be a District 4 Supervisor?” Gee will come out as a stronger candidate because of this process.
For all the sanctimony directed at any and all of the present candidates, it’s worth mentioning that you could do worse. Polling of the sort that boosted Supervisor Sarah Reyes also reveals that public safety is a top priority in District 4.
These days, District 4 is about as safe as a big city can get. The grow houses guarded by heavily armed crooks of yesteryear are but a fading memory in neighborhood scrapbooks. An alarming amount of the criminality in District 4, in fact, seems to emanate from its elected representatives.
Former District 4 supervisor Leland Yee went to prison a decade ago when he tried to broker an arms deal with a pair of undercover federal agents posing as mobsters. His successor and protégée Ed Jew was incarcerated for shaking down tapioca shops (also: for actually living in Burlingame).
So, no matter whom he picks, Lurie can probably manage to avoid picking the third District 4 supervisor to go to federal prison: If you will it, it is no dream.
In the less-than-probable event that Gee is appointed District 4 supervisor, the mayor essentially loses for winning. Lurie doesn’t seem to need the D4 appointee to pass his upzoning plan. It appears he already has his six supervisors lined up.
But, if elevated to the board by appointment or election, Gee could cause problems for the mayor down the road as a self-professed “labor union girlie” and labor-backed candidate heading into what appears to be an era of budgetary battles with the mayor’s office.
She would be a reliable vote for tax measures of the sort Lurie, his inner circle, his well-heeled backers and any vestiges of downtown power feel is an anathema to good government.
With this in mind, it’s odd that Gee was allowed to compete in this game show at all. It’s even odder that its format has allowed her to show up the competition. At this week’s candidate forum, she won a majority of the votes in the straw poll in a four-way contest.
In the event Gee isn’t named supervisor, this process enhanced her ability to run against the winner.
Lurie remains a well-liked mayor. But his upzoning plan is not a Westside winner. If passed over, Gee can hit the ground running and have her own conversations in the district, in Cantonese, regarding upzoning or the Great Highway or whatever else.
Meanwhile, whoever gets the job will potentially be burdened by difficult votes — and this difficult, difficult appointment process.
The private, behind-closed-doors version of selecting the next Sunset supe was a disaster. So is this extremely public reboot a means of, in part, outsourcing the vetting process to the public? It does feel that way.
And yet, mysteries — sober, stoned or drunk — remain. Following the Alcaraz meltdown, the mayor’s office sent aspirational supervisors a five-page questionnaire.
It asks for financial details so ornate that they would not even appear on the Form 700 Statement of Economic Interest that thousands of government employees must fill out. It asks for more information than any mayor, Lurie included, is required to disclose.
But it’s also curious what the questionnaire didn’t ask. Prospective D4 supervisors were told to list any offshore bank accounts they might have, but were not queried if they vote in city elections.
District 4 is a complicated place in a complicated city. In all fairness, it would be difficult for any mayor to find a unifying figure for its residents. Two of its best supervisors, Carmen Chu and Katy Tang, were initially reluctant to seek the position.
Tang disliked the job and declined to run for a second term. As noted, Yee and Jew went to prison.
Following l’affaire Alcaraz earlier this month, a mayoral strategist posted the results of a poll stating that Lurie remains wildly popular: 71 percent of city residents approve of the man’s work. Among 52 District 4 respondents, Lurie was riding a 66 percent approval rate.
Holy Small Sample Sizes, Batman! That’s 34 voters. Not so many more than the group of Sunset business leaders who voted in the recent pizza parlor poll.
The true measure of Lurie’s appointment will, eventually, be how good they actually are at the job — not the process by which they were selected.
The same will be true for this administration’s other strange selection processes, like the decision to unilaterally award a contract to revamp the city’s permit system to OpenGov, a firm that submitted a high bid and was rated poorly by city officials.
In the long term, public approval is not built on resplendent polling and political capital amassed like Smaug the Magnificent asleep atop a pile of gold. Rather, what’s important is how the power that comes with this job is applied — and what Lurie uses his political capital to do. We are still waiting to discover this.
In the meantime: I still don’t get it.
Everyone is not only confused we are doubting Lurie as a result.
How could he be this bad at the basics? It really is basic.
Here’s the thing: wealthy people are doing quite well, and they also fundamentally don’t understand the lived reality of the non-wealthy masses. So, the idea of doing something to actually change that reality is bizarre and foreign to Lurie, and it certainly won’t impress his rich friends. This means that all he is left with is ultimately PR, which however sunnily he and his team present it, is basically cynical smoke-and-mirrors to try to make people think things are better than they are. I’m not even sure Lurie gets that this is what he’s doing, but it’s certainly a lot of what has afflicted the mainstream Democratic party over the last many decades, and he’s just in that mold.
In any case, he doesn’t intend to do anything with his office other than try to make government “run more efficiently.” For wealthy businesspeople, there is no higher calling and it doesn’t matter what the government actually does because, again, the material conditions people are living with aren’t as important as aesthetics (gotta sweep away the poors) and metrics that show the current taxes paid are more than enough (i.e., investments of rich people who think they pay too much in taxes). And I suppose there’s probably something in the mix about whatever his various business-oriented advisors say is needed, like massive development in neighborhoods outside D2 — but the man isn’t going to want to fight for any of that stuff either, he’d rather be polite and well-liked (which is why the D4 appointment is such a pickle for him). Pretty incoherent politics, for sure, but yeah, wealthy people are like that.
Good points.
Joe, thanks for the cue to put on Ornette Coleman. _Something Else_ is brilliant; I don’t think it’s hard to get it at all.
I also don’t think it’s hard to get why Daniel Lurie is floundering. He’s never had a real job – “director of Tipping Point” is just doling out his family’s money – and his mom bought him the office for $9 million against weak competition. He has no idea what he’s doing. As that becomes more and more apparent, expect his honeymoon and those poll numbers to fade fast.
But that’s not to take away from another well-written column. If SF politics has to be dysfunctional, and that seems to be the rule, I’m glad we at least have you to make it entertaining.
Much of this fiasco lies at the feet of the 2022 Restricting Task Force, who drew a bespoke map for Joel Engardio. In fact he was unable to win a race without their assistance. The task force tried to do the same in District 1, but underestimated the degree to which Connie Chan was willing to work and win the seat again, and well overestimated their own candidate’s capabilities.
The redistricting knocked Cole Valley out of D5 — actually, a ragged, salamander-like line through the Haight. This was coincidentally after the Dean Preston campaign lambasted “tony Cole Valley” because his rival had moved there from the Lower Haight.
Thereby losing a bunch of progressive voters.
That has nothing to do with anything.
And so? Is that more important than the rest of the gerrymandering?
YES! Great points.
Why can’t the mayor just say, look I’m going to appoint someone who supports my agenda and has ties to my allies, then in 2026, the district can pick a long term supervisor in an open election?
Truly amazing, with all these people going to jail, etc. A cranky district it appears to be.
Thank you for putting in the effort for all of us to know what is going on.
If you just meant it as a throwaway line, disregard.
Sunsets are definitely not cranky folks – we just want representation and we’re tired of being ignored, lied to, screwed deliberately and represented by self-serving criminals.
What? How is any of this revelation of Lurie’s incompetent vetting representative of a “cranky district” at all? Engardio was fired for good reason – he’s a liar and he gaslit the district he was solely tasked with representing, for the benefit of private money groups and downtown interests. That’s a fail. Lurie’s compounded that YIMBY failure tenfold by not doing the basics in his replacement, including the most rudimentary background check. He claims he hired a firm to do the vetting – WHICH FIRM EXACTLY? So far it looks like Han Zou was fully in charge and just didn’t do… anything right. Back to my original point, what does that have to do with the people who live in the district and want a real, ACTUAL representative? That’s not cranky, that’s Democracy! Personally I’m surprised Chow didn’t have his ducks in a row before he poked his head in, but that’s the least of our worries. He’s out.
@Welp – The BIG LIE in this whole thing is calling Engardio a liar. His position on the fate of the Great Highway is well-documented, archived at the Internet Archive. People calling him a liar just handwave in the general direction of nothing actually documented.
Engardio lied and was fired. People hate him.
You didn’t get a vote and don’t live in the district.
FTFY.
Engardio lied multiple times on many points and you’ve been corrected multiple times on this, but continue to spew talking points that don’t line up with reality. Fact is he’s fired because the Sunset knows he’s not trustworthy and unfit for public service. He’s a liar and you can dither in defense of that as long as you like. It does nothing real, just like Engardio’s actual record.
Yes, we understand you’re part of the bicycle-first mafia and will say anything to defend your agenda, but it doesn’t work here.
“District 4 is a complicated place in a complicated city.” Yes, if you don’t live in D4, it can look complicated. However, D4 and the westside is really fairly simple. It’s an amalgamation of the urban and suburban and those corresponding tendencies found in today’s Democratic Party. It is fairly diverse demographically, but embraces policing, public safety and a tough love approach to homelessness due to the presence of multi-gen families with children. It is pro- public education but generally favors more traditional school policies over more progressive ones. This is where moderate candidates get the nod. At the same time, cars are seen as essential due to the lack of underground metro coverage and the spread out nature of its business corridors / distance from downtown. Residents like the district’s much quieter streets, the presence of backyards, parking and the views of the ocean and its sunsets. Lurie’s upzoning plan is a threat to all this. So, moderate candidates who are in alliance with the urbanist Yimby agenda lose votes here. At the same time, D4 is firmly pro-democratic party – embraces our city’s working people, help for immigrant families making their way, good paying union jobs, small businesses, a functional Muni for those who need it and robust social services. I’d say it is balanced if nothing else. In fact, it blends the best shades of the city’s political spectrum.
Excellent observations.
You’re used to machine mayors appointing supervisors from a deep bench cultivated, vetted and molded over decades, that Lurie just doesn’t have.
I’ll read the clumsiness of this appointment as a feature of a mayor without a political base more than a bug of political incompetence or malevolence. It certainly does not reek of corruption like previous appointments have.
You forgot to mention that D4 also elected the Mar brother who could actually fog a mirror and more.
I’m not a historian or scholar of jazz but it appears the quotation is from Roy Eldridge.
The “poll” “cited” in this column is just some guy on LinkedIn. He may be correct but it’s lame that he doesn’t have the motivation to post these results at an unconditionally public web location.
The pizza at hole in the wall is really not very good.
Not ragging on Joe E. Another good column on which I think I can comment minorly.
He wants an automaton to run YIMBY business. Period.
YIMBY business has already been run and won, decisively in Sacramento to the extent that it is impossible for the opposing forces as arrayed right now to come anywhere near close to electing enough people to Sacramento to repeal any of Wiener’s malevolence.
The districts getting upzoned voted for Scott Wiener, twice, and for Dan Lurie for mayor, all while they pledged in public to upzone and build more housing.
Take the L on land use, otherwise all we got are “Old Man Yells at Cloud.” Does anyone really want to age in place like Calvin Welch? Whether upzoning serves as sufficient wedge to put Chan over the top is another question entirely.
It’s a sham of a plan. I will not lay down for it.
What Welp said. Builder remedy is a scam and a scandal.
We have to fight the YIMBY liars.
Giving up is not an option.
My reply is to marcos.
The Builder’s remedy was always designed to hit. That was why he put it in there. You’re falling for it.
SF could build the thousands of units if SF wanted to do that as a City and County, but has ZERO POWER to force developers to do so – and none of that helps the lower income classes that the housing crisis actually affects. Period. It’s a scam.
Do not think because the scam was well-conceived tactically that it’s somehow necessary to lay down for it, that’s an additional scam.
If you succeed in derailing Lurie’s plan, these districts having voted for Wiener and Lurie, then the builder’s remedy will hit the already upzoned neighborhoods the hardest, the ones that did not vote for Lurie or Wiener and which had Chris Daly intentionally conflicted out when we were upzoned for TOD 17 yr ago. To a planning commissioner and supervisor, D4 and D2/3 voted to upzone the Eastern Neighborhoods.
It is time for you all to sit down and shut up and take what you’ve voted for before you do any more damage to innocent third party neighborhoods.
Lurie is forced to make the choice and look like an idiot. That’s some catch that catch-22.
This is his job and he’s apparently not taking it seriously enough, as Alcaraz should have been a massive wakeup call for his administration. Instead he did it again with Deng who had never voted until prop 50. That’s not just political incompetence, that’s not doing your homework nor giving hardly a damn. These things aren’t difficult to find out, he just didn’t try to do that before swinging his idle gaze around.
If anyone made Lurie look like an idiot here, let’s face it, it wasn’t some byzantine distopian political machine that caused it. He did it to himself.
YIMBY priorities of getting his vote rammed through were more important than getting a trusted, vetted community representative in there, and it burned him – and rightfully so, damn. I don’t see catch-22, I see catch-a-clue.
Dystopian. I actually said distopian? Wow.